Reviews of Fullmetal Alchemist (2001) and related work

• Adaptation: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)
  • Sequel: Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa (2005)

Fullmetal Alchemist (2001)

Arakawa Hiromu (writer-artist).

Read in 2024.

Read in the standard Japanese edition of 27 tankōbon.

Fullmetal Alchemist (FMA) is, at its heart, a standard shōnen adventure, originally published in a monthly magazine of comics for boys. It is both an excellent example of that genre and a serviceable example of how boys’ comics in Japan in the first decade of the new millennium differed from their Western counterparts.

First, the material is darker. On the very first page, the protagonist is already maimed, crawling on the bloody stump of his leg. This is because he’s performed black magic analogous to a Satanic ritual. His brother, the deuteragonist, lost his entire body in the same transgression. The brother therefore lives as a hollow suit of armour, unable to sleep or feel anyone’s touch. He is constantly afraid that the makeshift solution that keeps him alive will fail. To cure himself and his brother, the protagonist agrees to be a State Alchemist. In this role, he has better access to research funds and materials, but the reason why these materials are so restricted is to tie alchemists, and their dangerous knowledge, to the military dictatorship of Amestris.

The military is fashionable and morally compromised like Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988). The most important allies of the adventuring boys are in the military, and they are the acknowledged perpetrators, not victims, of a recent genocide. After explaining their role in this event (volume 15), these allies explain that although they are are trying to reform the state and prevent further violence, doing so will eventually reveal their own crimes. Without the military dictatorship protecting them, the public will stop revering them and see them for what they are. Again, these mass murderers of the innocent are allies of the main characters. The villains are worse.

In the USA at this time, a narrative this dark would have been hard to sell to such a young audience, lest the advertisers flee the magazine. At minimum, the genocide would have been safely attributed to inherent evil, and the evildoers would have been punished. However, the second major feature of shōnen manga on proud display in FMA is its inclusive and redemptive moral arc. Some but not all antagonists become allies, or regret their evil deeds. This moralism is non-punitive and non-Christian, framed both in terms of human potential and in terms of mutual civility and respect, despite the protagonist being brash and bratty. Some non-human characters dismiss humans as inferior—in the same way that real perpetrators of genocide tend to dismiss their victims as non-human vermin—but these fantasy racists are the most likely to see the error of their ways in the end. It’s a worthy meditation on the USA’s contemporary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, seamlessly woven into a children’s adventure with typical idealism and optimism. This is most clearly identifiable in the protagonist’s decision not to use ill-gotten gains or allow any innocent bystanders to come to harm in a revolutionary war against a godlike tyrant threatening to kill 50 million people. Predictably, there is an unrealistically happy ending, but the tonal clash is fairly mild. FMA is unusually intelligent, compassionate and respectful in its use of human-on-human genocide as a central motif in an epic fantasy, despite the use of slapstick violence and supernatural moral dichotomy elsewhere in the work.

The third and final major difference between FMA and its contemporary Western competition is the coherence of its narrative across 5000 pages and hundreds of years of history. There are loose ends, soft supernatural premises, minor internal contradictions and signs of the author sometimes changing course, but no real retcons or restarts. The story maintains a similar level of quality all the way through.

As an example of a loose end, I thought Hawkeye’s back tattoo was Chekhov’s gun, but no, it never comes up after being shown once. As an example of soft supernatural premises, the alchemy of the fiction is tied to historical alchemy including Empedocles’s four elements (mentioned in chapter 74), but it’s also tied to 1910s chemistry. Protagonist Edward Elric repeatedly lists chemical elements. Arakawa tried to tie it all together into a system that is treated as an active scientific discipline within the secondary world’s laboratories, but her alchemy is mostly flashy telekinetic combat magic, which does not follow from the stated premises. In a world that is mostly at the tech level of real-world 1914 CE, there are WW2-era battle tanks and hypertech prosthetics, but there are no alchemists building such tanks or prosthetics. Realistically, since alchemy here is an extremely fast way to build lasting things even from impure raw materials, it would make more sense to show alchemists working in factories. That wouldn’t be typical of shōnen adventure fiction, but then again, neither is genocide. There are several cases where alchemists working off screen have tried to build soldiers (anthropomorphic-animal chimerae, possessed suits of armour, and one-eyed dolls) instead of doing the fighting themselves, but this always backfires. Dumb superhero stuff works better for no good reason.

Most of the internal contradictions have to do with a grand conspiracy, which is a narcissistic fantasy motif more common in the USA. As an example of such a contradiction, Selim Bradley is famous as the only child of the military dictator and known affectionately to the populace as Selim-bocchan (chapter 94), yet almost nobody seems to notice or care that Selim has stayed a boy for decades. Even his adoptive mother, who is an outsider to the conspiracy, seems to think that Selim is a normal human child, and she spent those decades with him. Another such weakness in the plotting has intradiegetic backing but is still a bad idea: The special status of the protagonist as an intended human sacrifice. The villains don’t want to kill him, but it turns out at the end that he might as well be unconscious to meet their needs, so they could and should have incapacitated him, or killed him and encouraged others to qualify for their ritual in his place. Instead, they let him roam free and actually send their hostage to him, which is not what hostages are for.

Some internal contradictions are more prosaic. For example, before the climax, Mei seems to take months travelling between two major cities connected by rail, despite having no reason to delay. The time of her arrival is clearly driven by extradiegetic concerns. There are many such unlikely coincidences to weave the plot together, including two unrelated characters with apparently limitless eidetic memory.

There are, of course, other differences between FMA and Western comics of the time. The analog art, with its careful linework, cross-hatching and late-analog screentone, is gorgeous in its black-and-white elegance. It took a lot of assistants working with Arakawa to range so confidently from horror scenes influenced by interwar German expressionism to relaxing pastorals and lively crowd scenes in cozy dieselpunk towns. There is a lot of action, but I don’t think Arakawa’s heart was in it. Her heart may have been in the omake: Crudely drawn bonus material where she mocks her own epic. This includes multiple glimpses of a hilarious alternate universe where the kind young deuteragonist Alphonse Elric picks up cats and lets them live inside his hollow steel body, which culminates in an abbreviated form of a pivotal plot point where Alphonse regains his memory of the traumatic event that opens the series. Sometimes they bleed over, as in chapter 83, where Major Armstrong’s youngest sister—introduced as a gag character lifting a piano in bonus material—suddenly appears in canon along with their parents.

On the subject of East and West, FMA is also an example of exoticism. At the time, Japanese pop culture often mined Christian motifs for flavour. You see superficial forms of this in the likes of Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995), Trigun (1998) and Hellsing (2001), slightly more sincere uses in Patlabor (1989) and Haibane Renmei (2002), etc. FMA is definitely on the superficial side with “seven deadly sins”-themed evil henchmen, and its redemptionism isn’t Christian, but there is one ankle-deep correspondence in the series’s three bad father figures. These three are symbolically stacked on top of one another. The rebellious protagonist’s actual father (first name Van, surname Hohenheim) is morally grey or black at first. He resembles but opposes Father (otou-sama), a more evil and more Satanic figure, who in turn resembles but opposes (and briefly suborns) an inscrutable god at the top of the stack. Van Hohenheim redeems himself, and he started his journey as a humble slave reminiscent of the disappointed Christian slaves of Epistles (ca. 110 CE), which aligns him with Jesus. On the other hand, it is his son, the protagonist, who ends up crucified with a piece of rebar like a nail through his arm, so the whole sequence of four characters is approximately two parts Jesus to two parts Demiurge.

I chose to pick up this series as an exercise in Japanese after learning the kyōiku kanji. It has furigana because it’s for kids, but it also features a broad range of speaking styles, not dialects but formal, military and slightly antiquated Japanese. These require you to puzzle out some less-common grammar and vocabulary. I consulted Google Lens or my dictionary and took notes about once every ten pages from the first two thirds. In the last third of the series, where there was less exposition, I had absorbed enough of Arakawa’s vocabulary that I could stop taking notes and proceed much faster. It was a good choice for my grade-school reading level, partly because it is an enjoyable, character-driven story where the art’s good for clues. Incidentally, a lot of the English-sounding character names are taken from military manuals about vehicles and guns.

As secondary worlds go, this one is pretty thin, but its smooth and ultimately wholesome combination of moods and motifs make it suitable for truly broad audiences.

References here: Tiger & Bunny (2011), Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017).

sequential art text Japanese production fiction series

‣ Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)

A year-long TV series based on early volumes of the comic. The superpowers are excessive, the music and character designs are good, and the combination of different moods is well done. Some of the humour is probably unintentional, as when one enemy is destroyed through evaporation after she’s been transmuted into ethanol.

I saw the initial airing of episode 36 in Japan. After finishing the comic, I would not recommend this adaptation of it if you’re just starting out. Their plots diverge substantially, even more than is typical of anime made from ongoing hit manga.

References here: Violet Evergarden (2018).

moving picture adaptation Japanese production animation fiction series

‣‣ Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa (2005)

Cinematic feature. Nice film-historical jokes. The budget doesn’t go all the way, the music is dull, there is not much closure and the villain is simply evil, but much of the spirit remains. The original title, Shanbara wo iku mono, can be misread as meaning “The Tax Collectors of Shamballa”.

References here: “Don’t mention the war!”.

moving picture sequel Japanese production animation fiction